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Archive for February, 2007

The Great Snow Storm of 2007

Posted by Dan Hertz on February 15, 2007

Well, for those of you who weren’t here to witness it, Cornell yesterday had to close early due to snow. This is an extremely rare event, having happened only two or three times before ever, as far as I can gather. The reports seem to be a little unclear, but there were apparently a couple of times in the nineties where they closed because of some extremely impressive storms. The Cornell Daily Sun erroneously reported that the university had closed in April of 2004 because of four feet of snow (as reported here http://www.cornellsun.com/node/21346), which made me wonder if I had been somewhere else at that time, because I certainly did not recall there being any kind of snow closings during all my time here. I don’t even recall the City of Ithaca having declared a Snow Emergency, for that matter, which obviously also happened.

They’ve now plowed my street once, so there is at least one track free running down the middle. But it’s hardly the highest priority for the city, I imagine, so I don’t know when they’re going to get it cleared more. However, things are sufficiently clear for Beth to get here this afternoon, which is the important thing. I also discovered that my landlords had shoveled my side of the driveway, which was nice. There was a big pile of snow at the foot of the driveway from the plows, which I did have to clear, but that was a relatively minor thing on the whole. It turns out that my landlords thought it was just part of the deal that they cleared the snow. And they were impressed that I’d cleared the pile at the foot of the driveway. I’m the first tenant to actually do any kind of snow removal, apparently.

Anyway, I’m off to teach lab now. There’s going to have to be a makeup session in a couple weeks for the section yesterday that got canceled. I’m sure the students aren’t too crazy about that, since it will be the day before their first prelim, but I don’t see any way around it.

Posted in News Flash | 2 Comments »

Overdue update

Posted by Dan Hertz on February 8, 2007

Ok, so I’ve been informed that I’m being delinquent in updating this, which is true. Lately I’ve been rather busy with trying to get my CV put together and currently I’m trying to write my talk for the Lake Louise Winter Institute, which I’m going to be attending in a week and a half.

In other news, I’ve recently started watching Rome, the HBO series. All I can say so far is WOW. I understand a lot better why George R R Martin is so excited about having HBO do a dramatization of A Song of Ice and Fire now, if they can do a similar scale of production as they did for Rome. Because it’s really very very impressive. If this is what all those HBO series everyone talks about are like, then I suddenly understand why everyone raves about them. I’m not a terrific historical scholar of ancient Rome, so I can’t speak to its accuracy on all fronts, but obviously they’ve made up a fair bit of stuff, which is well within their rights. I mean, I don’t really feel that anyone blames Robert Graves for making up a good bit of history when he wrote I, Claudius, either.
Anyway, the production value of the show is amazing, the acting is quite good, and overall it is just pretty awesome. The fact that there are new episodes of Lost coming out seems kind of less exciting, in comparison, I have to say. I’m a bit disappointed that there are only going to be two seasons of it, but I’ll have to live with that, I suppose.

Posted in Movies/TV | 1 Comment »